For those of you interested in comparisons of methods to gain user insights, Brianna Sylver has compiled a nice comparison over at Core 77. It can be found here. Most of it is known stuff, but I like the way she relates the different methods to the different phases of the design process. However, its obvious that this is from the USA, (where everything is bigger) since her resource requirements are a factor of 10 away from what I am used to (3.5 months for ethnographic studies – yes please).

We are working on our own set of tools to facilitate user insights as part of the AT-ONE process. This will be similar to Briannas, but will have more depth, and link the customer input to idea generation techniques, to enable people to move from insights to innovations.